Natural MicroSystems Acquires Mobilee, Inc., Developer of Innovative Streaming Media Technology for Voice Web

Business Wire, April 11, 2001

Business/Technology Editors

FRAMINGHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 11, 2001

Leverages Mobilee's VoiceXML and Audio Streaming to Introduce Industry's First Complete Platform for Voice Web Applications--HearSay

SoftServer

Natural MicroSystems (NASDAQ: NMSS), the technology leader enabling a new era of communications, today announced the acquisition of privately held Mobilee, Inc., a Boston-based wireless Internet infrastructure provider. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

NMS also announced the first product to combine Mobilee and NMS technologies -- HearSay(TM) SoftServer -- the industry's most comprehensive voice Internet platform, designed to help service providers bring innovative applications to market faster and at lower costs than ever before.

Mobilee employees will join the New Network Solutions business unit of Natural MicroSystems, where they will continue their key roles in developing voice-enabled products and services, as well as provide ongoing support to Mobilee customers and partners.

"The addition of Mobilee's team and successful voice infrastructure technologies will accelerate our penetration of the high-growth Voice Web market," said NMS Chairman and CEO Bob Schechter. "Many of the firms that define this sector, such as Tellme, Yahoo!, BeVocal and Webley, have already launched voice-driven services using NMS' communications platforms."

"As the market expands, NMS recognizes the requirement to help new entrants expedite the availability of their services, by providing them with increasingly robust and more feature-rich platforms," Schechter continued. "By tightly integrating VoiceXML and audio streaming functionality directly into our offerings, Mobilee's technology enables NMS to extend a compelling capability to the next wave of companies bringing voice-activated Web content to the phone. And by welcoming Mobilee's world-class research and development team in Israel, NMS establishes a presence in an acknowledged world center of voice product innovation."

"There is a precise fit between Mobilee's VoiceXML and audio streaming technologies and NMS'industry-leading voice platforms," said Mobilee's President and CEO Jacob Guedalia. "For telecom carriers, service providers and communications equipment suppliers, merging the technologies of our two companies paves the fast track to a high-growth market -- and will make Voice Web applications a reality for more enterprises and service providers that much sooner. Mobilee's voice interface components are a field-tested, proven foundation for Web-to-phone applications, having been the base of the speech-activated voice portal for such leaders as Lycos. Now, being part of NMS creates new opportunities to advance our software technology and to address a wider market."

According to a March 2001 Voice Web study by The Kelsey Group of Princeton, NJ, a global market is emerging in voice recognition-based information, messaging, and customer-care services and technology. The report projects that worldwide spending and revenues from Voice Web and voice applications will reach $41 billion by 2005. Services and applications created with such offerings are accessed with spoken commands through wireless or wireline phones. Examples include:

-- Voice portals that provide text-to-speech email, driving directions,
business locators, and more

-- Unified communications offerings that combine voice, fax and email services

-- Self-service customer contact centers for businesses

HearSay SoftServer: Complete Phone-to-Web Platform

The first yield of the acquisition, HearSay SoftServer is a front-to-back-end voice Internet platform that connects phones to voice-driven content. HearSay SoftServer speeds time-to-revenue for telecommunications carriers, service providers and equipment manufacturers -- and for their enterprise customers -- as they enter the high-growth realm of the Voice Web.

HearSay SoftServer melds Mobilee's VoiceXML runtime environment and audio streaming software with NMS' carrier-grade HearSay platform, which supplies media processing, speech recognition and a powerful development environment for networked voice applications. Currently, both NMS and Mobilee have implemented platforms with high-quality speech recognition from Nuance. This integrates everything from the front-end voice interface through high-performance voice recognition and text-to-speech processing, in addition to providing source code and the building blocks necessary to develop voice Internet applications.

HearSay SoftServer packages VoiceXML source code and a reference platform with a suite of VoiceXML applications developed by Mobilee: voice portal, voice-activated dialer, email-by-phone and instant messaging. The new platform also offers an optional service contract, a bundle of third-party audio content and a back-end content management platform that can be integrated with a personalization engine to deliver rich services to users.

As an extension of NMS' existing high-density HearSay hardware and software offering, HearSay SoftServer delivers the extensive scalability and carrier-grade features to support any size of voice-driven application or service. A network-agnostic approach to integrated telephony and speech application program interfaces (APIs) accelerates deployment, while further reducing costs. With connectivity to next-generation voice-over-IP networks and the public switched telephone network (PSTN), HearSay helps developers launch flexible voice-enabled applications and services that benefit from sustainable price/performance.